


Scars of Skywalker

by stabbyunicorn



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Lightsabers, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, let the past die, saying goodbye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22181863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stabbyunicorn/pseuds/stabbyunicorn
Summary: Some scars can’t be healed. Alternate end scene forThe Rise of Skywalker.(Spoilers)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Scars of Skywalker

It flowed with the impressionistic swirls of a once-raging fire. Rey had felt its presence when she’d first arrived in the system: a scar left upon the planet decades past, a scar still screaming into the Force.

She landed deep within its cold burning embrace, inside the fortress that that lay at its center. Its Dark wind blanketed her as she stepped from Luke Skywalker’s old X-Wing into the fortress’s hanger bay, and though Rey was not of the Dark, somehow still she found that wind a comfort. It knew what she would do. It welcomed it.

So did they: Luke’s and Leia’s translucent blue spirits watched over her even now, standing at the hanger’s other end, waiting to join her on her trek through what once had been Darth Vader’s castle.

Rey’s fingers trailed across the X-Wing’s long metal nose, feeling its every dent and bruise brush beneath her fingers. The ship sang with the Light— a small beacon swimming in the endless Dark ocean that was the planet of Mustafar.

Luke and Leia smiled at her, their ghostly forms shimmering in electric blue halos. They were remnants, just as was the X-Wing Rey had flown in, and just as were the two lightsabers hanging from her belt. They were Skywalker.

They accompanied Rey as she walked through the castle, breathing in its history. It was a key, she could tell, a key to the Dark well of Force that stretched down to the planet’s core— Vader hadn’t been the first to leave his mark on Mustafar.

At last, Rey stepped through what had been meant as a front door, but had rarely been used as one. Sweltering heat assaulted her as she strode from the tower and onto the rocky precipice beside it. The stench of sulfur was overpowering. Still she pressed on.

The records had disagreed on where it had happened, but she didn’t need the records to see what was plain to the very core of her being: a spot barely a half-mile out, settled amongst the echoes of structures decades-since destroyed.

This was where it had happened: where Anakin’s fall had been made complete, where he himself brought the end he’d sought so hard to prevent. Even still, the tendrils of Force reached for a new neck to grip and squeeze…

Hardly a hundred yards further was the hill down which he’d tumbled, where he’d laid and burned…

She could see it all from here. Where he’d fallen, where he’d burned, where he’d stayed. His Hell.

The scars were too deep for the Light to heal, the Dark side of the Force too entrenched.

It was not for Rey to fix.

Rey knelt on the rocky ground. She felt its warmth beneath her fingers. The remains of Anakin’s fall squeezed her throat with a gentle tickling grasp; she smiled sadly in response.

From her side she pulled the sabers, Luke’s and Leia’s, their handles glinting within the lava’s red light. She placed them gently down on the ground where once Padmé had fallen.

Like the X-Wing, they sang in the Force, and though they were of the Light, they were no less scars, shining bright and weaving into the dark scarred tapestry all around them.

Yards away, Luke and Leia’s ghostly forms watched over her.

_Let the past die,_ they seemed to whisper, though they did not speak; it was not the time for words.

Rey could not heal the scars; the Light could not shine so brightly, and even if it could, in this place it never would.

But what the Light could not heal, the Dark could still destroy.

With a final glance at Luke and Leia, Rey closed her eyes.

She reached out— for the Light, yes, but for the dark as well; for that ocean permeating the planet, embracing it in all its raging fury, all its hatred, all its pain.

Rey couldn’t notice her body rise into the air, Force flowing around and through her and pooling into a cyclone of hateful power that longed for nothing more to destroy. It twisted and crackled in bright bolts of tightly-contained lightning, begging for escape—

_“You’re going down a path I can’t follow.” “You were my brother, Anakin!” “I hate you!” _

_“Luke… Leia…”_

_“Your father’s lightsaber.” “He told me enough.” “He betrayed and murdered your father…” “He told me you killed him.”_

_“There is no conflict.” “I’m a Jedi, like my father before me.” “Help me take this mask off.”_

_“Hope is like the sun…” “The legacy of the Jedi is failure.” “If you only believe it when you see it you’ll never make it through the night.”_

_“I know what I have to do…” “We have everything we need.” “…but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.”_

_“You know what you need to do.”_

_“Let the past die.”_

The Force lashed out in all its Dark beauty, striking the lightsabers, the fortress, the very scars themselves. It was electricity, fire, implosion— it was—

_Destruction._

Rey pulled and pulled from the planet’s nearly endless well of Dark power until that well lay spent, Vader’s fortress crumbling, the Sith caves beneath it collapsing, the rubble turning to dust and that very dust melting, until finally beneath her lay a miles-wide platau as smooth as glass, with no fortresses or lightsabers or X-Wings or any of it, all their scars wiped away in the Dark’s beautiful destruction.

Slowly, Rey’s body sank.

Her hand touched the new, smooth surface. In the distance, she could see the lava pouring in. Soon, her new plateau would be swallowed beneath its depths.

It was done.

The scars were gone; not healed, but destroyed in Dark cleansing fire.

_Let the past die._

The Skywalker legacy was over, wiped away so that the slate may be clean and the galaxy may start afresh, the damage that had begun here on Mustafar now laid to rest. All that was left now was…

Rey scanned the horizon.

There! Luke and Leia still stood, shimmering and translucent.

They smiled at her, and gave her a slow, gentle nod.

And then, at last, they faded away, until all that was left was the Force, not Dark or Light but just Force: binding, penetrating, tying the very galaxy together.

It was over.

She engaged her comlink.

“Rose? Finn? Poe?” she said. “I’m ready.”

_Let the past die,_ Ben Solo had said.

And Rey had.

**Author's Note:**

> I was not a big fan of Tatooine as the planet for the big Skywalker send off. There are plenty of worse planets—Nar Shadaa, for example, or any other random planet—but there are also plenty of better ones.
> 
> Mustafar is not a great planet (in more ways than one), but I think even it would be a better choice than Tatooine (it’s still not a good one).
> 
> I think I’d have picked a planet like Naboo, if I were writing TROS. But to be fair, I’d have written almost everything differently, and though I probably still would have written shit, said shit probably still would have been a better story than TROS was.
> 
> For all its great visuals, music, and performances, I feel like TROS had an uninspired story utterly lacking in depth, and I think it squandered some great things TLJ had set up for it (to be fair, I’m one of those nuts who think TLJ is possibly the best Star War; that’s my hot take).


End file.
